Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  “I needed a break,” Rudi said, deploying the legend effortlessly. “I’ve been opening a new restaurant in Berlin and things got a bit hectic. I was starting to shout at the kitchen crew.” He shrugged. “Time to take a few days off.”

  “Your own restaurant?”

  Rudi shook his head. “My employer’s. In Poland.”

  “A Pole is opening a restaurant in Berlin?”

  “Max thought it was time to repay the favour for 1939. He’s Silesian, anyway. That’s sort of German.”

  Toomas rubbed his face. “You see, I can’t understand why you wound up there when there are perfectly adequate restaurants in Estonia.”

  “Well, that’s the important phrase, isn’t it? ‘Perfectly adequate.’ Not ‘really excellent.’”

  “Will you invite me to the grand opening?”

  “Would you come?”

  “To Germany?” Toomas made a spitting sound.

  “Well then.”

  Toomas looked out over the Gulf of Finland and took another deep breath. “I suppose Ivari told you.”

  “Told me what, father?”

  Toomas looked at him. “Don’t do that ‘told me what, father?’ You’re not a good liar.”

  “I certainly didn’t inherit that from you.”

  His father grinned. “I’ll bet you thought that would make me angry, eh?”

  “I’ll bet it does, too. You’re just a better liar than me.”

  The grin went away. “We’re fighting for our very existence here.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Really. It’s not like things were when we first came here. Governments always loved the park, they gave us anything we wanted. They understood it’s the heart of every Estonian.”

  Rudi snorted. “It’s a very large and picturesque area of otherwise not very useful land, father.”

  Toomas thumped his chest. “The heart!” he cried.

  Rudi looked out over the sea.

  “But now we have this band of brigands in Tallinn,” Toomas went on. “All they see is an opportunity to suck us dry for their own benefit.”

  “You’re just pissed off because they won’t give you everything you want, old man,” Rudi said. “I know how you work.”

  His father shook his head. “We get a UN Heritage Grant. Or we should. I know how much that grant is, to the penny. It’s been two years since we saw any of it. And it hasn’t been for want of asking.”

  Rudi glanced at him. “You’re sure?”

  “Do me a favour. I trained as an accountant.”

  “You trained as an architect.”

  “And some time after that I trained as an accountant. Don’t look at me like that. I know how to read a balance sheet. I asked the UN Heritage Organisation for their disbursements and they emailed them back to me the same day. I asked the Ministry about them and I still haven’t heard back.” Toomas hard-landed a fist in his palm. “It’s graft on a colossal scale. It’s a national disgrace.”

  “So go to court.”

  “In this fucking country?” Toomas yelled. He waved the prospect away. “Please, don’t mention that again.”

  “This fucking country being the country you love so much, and everything.”

  Toomas drew himself up to his full height and adjusted the bill of his baseball cap. The Aeroflot logo protruded from his forehead like the horn of a mythical beast. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said.

  “If you really knew what I was thinking, you’d already be running,” said Rudi.

  Toomas ignored him. “You’re thinking this is the last act of a lonely, bitter old man, a last stab for immortality after a wasted life.”

  Rudi shrugged. “Crossed my mind,” he admitted.

  “And there’s some currency in that,” Toomas admitted. He spread his hands. “I mean, how much longer do I have, realistically?”

  “Stop that,” Rudi snapped. “Just stop it. I’ve been listening to that bullshit since I was eight years old and I don’t have to listen to it any more.”

  Toomas sighed. Then he sighed again, and for a long time he didn’t say anything and they stood side by side watching the Baltic lap unhurriedly at the edge of their homeland.

  “I love it here,” Toomas said finally, and it was as though all the bullshit had been stripped from his voice. “I spent my entire life looking for somewhere to belong, and I found it here. And we had a lot of good years after that. And then the pirates moved in. They’ve been nibbling away at the edges of the park for the past two years. New towns, developments, sports arenas. Nothing I say does any good, the land just gets eaten up, year after year, hectare by hectare. One day there’ll be nothing but a line of hotels where we’re standing now. It’ll all be gone. Because greedy men came to power in Tallinn. They don’t care about our heritage. All they care about is their foreign partners, the ones who are coming in to build the sports arenas and the hotels. We’re just an irrelevance. Something to be swept aside in the name of progress.”

  Rudi looked about him. “You’d have to be out of your mind to build an hotel here,” he said.

  Toomas shook his head. “That’s not you talking,” he said. “That’s how you feel about me talking.”

  Rudi thought about it. “Fair point,” he said finally. “So this is why you want to secede.”

  Toomas pouted. “No one listens, boy.”

  “I do wish you’d stop calling me boy, you know?”

  “No one listens, Rudi,” Toomas said loudly. “So I’m going to take it away from them.”

  Rudi scratched his head. “If what you say is true and so much money’s at stake here, they’ll try to stop you.”

  “Oh, that’s started already.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes. We’ve had some vandalism in the park over the past few weeks. Nothing dreadful, certainly nothing we haven’t had before from drunken lads out on a dare, but this is different. It’s too careful, too well-executed. It’s not about to make me stop, and they know that. It isn’t supposed to make me stop; it’s just to open a conversation with me, let me know they’re ready and waiting.”

  Rudi looked at him. “People are going to get hurt.”

  “Is that supposed to deter me?”

  “Well, it might make most normal people at least stop and think about what they were doing, but no, I was just stating a fact. People are going to get hurt if this thing goes any further.”

  Toomas rammed his fists into the pockets of his parka hard enough for Rudi to hear stitching break. He walked away a few steps.

  “It’s the government, Dad,” said Rudi. “They can’t get the Ministry to fire you because that would be too obvious, but there’s a lot of other stuff they can do. You have no idea.”

  “Maret found child pornography on our computer,” said Toomas.

  Rudi regarded his father levelly.

  “Oh,” Toomas waved his hand irritably, “not mine. Planted there. Another part of the conversation.”

  “What did you do?”

  Toomas shrugged. “Formatted the drives and then took them out and physically destroyed them.”

  “I hope you destroyed them thoroughly.”

  “I put them through a woodchipper.”

  “That’ll do it,” Rudi allowed.

  Toomas glared at him. “You’re enjoying this.”

  “It’s not without its humorous side, but no, I’m not really enjoying it. That won’t be the end of it, you know. There’ll be some stuff in secure online storage somewhere that leads back to you, with passwords only you’d know.”

  “I know. They were just letting me know it’s ready and waiting for them to use to discredit me, if they think they have to.” Toomas sighed. “Maret... Maret said she believed me when I told her I knew nothing about it. She said she believed me when I told her it was planted there. But I saw the look in her eyes, and she wasn’t sure.”

  “Oh.” Rudi scowled and rubbed his face.

  “Those motherfuckers have come between
me and my partner,” said Toomas. “Coming after me, I could accept that. I’m a big boy now and I know the rules of the game. But involving Maret...” He shook his head. “No. I won’t stand for that.”

  “It might have been a move to provoke you into doing something stupid,” Rudi warned. “Make you do most of their work for them.”

  “Why would they care about that? They have plenty of resources.”

  “It limits their exposure. The less they have to do, the less there is for nosey journalists to discover after it’s all over.”

  Toomas’s shoulders slumped. “So what should I do?”

  “About the pornography? There’s nothing you can do. There’s no way to find it because we don’t know where it is. We can’t just google your name and ‘child pornography’ and there it’ll be, sitting on a server in a cupboard in Dushanbe or Buenos Aires. You’ll have to be proactive. Write to the news channels. Tell them what you found on your computer. Tell them you suspect there’s another stash out there, just waiting to be ‘found’ to blacken your name.”

  “They’ll deny it.”

  “Of course. But it makes it a little harder for them to suddenly ‘find’ it and make it look credible. And it gets you into the conversation.” Rudi ran a hand through his hair. “Listen to me. I came out here to talk you out of this madness and I’m giving you advice instead.”

  “Can you and your friends help?”

  Rudi felt a chill touch him. “I’m a chef, Dad. Most of my friends are chefs. We could do the catering for you.”

  “Frances says you’re with Intelligence.”

  Oh, so that was it. He breathed a barely-detectable sigh of relief and then burst into real laughter. “No, Dad, I’m not with Intelligence. I just cook food.”

  Toomas’s face fell. “I thought...”

  “No,” said Rudi, for the first time in many years feeling anything approaching sympathy for his father. “Just a cook.”

  Toomas grimaced. “Ach, you’d have to say that.”

  Rudi spread his hands in exasperation. “Just a cook,” he said again. “And if I were with Intelligence, I’d be working for the Government and I’d be the very last person you’d want to ask for help.”

  “So it’s true? You’re a cuckoo in my nest, then?”

  Rudi slapped his forehead. “Dad, no! I don’t work for Intelligence. I’m a chef.” He rubbed his eyes. “The only way to get out of this thing is to stop it.”

  Toomas shook his head. “Won’t happen.”

  “Send them a message. Tell them you’re prepared to compromise.”

  “No compromise.”

  “Tell them...” He searched for the words. “Tell them you’ll back down if they guarantee the status of part of the park in perpetuity. Tell them you’ll settle for that, they can have the rest for their hotels and arenas.” He spread his arms wide. “It’s a big park, Dad.”

  Toomas had not stopped shaking his head. “No. No. No. No compromise. No surrender. They don’t get their filthy hands on another square millimetre of this place. They’ve driven a wedge between me and Maret and I’m not going to sit down and let that pass. One of us gets the entire park, the other gets nothing. That’s how it will end.”

  “It will end with you dead,” Rudi said.

  Toomas abruptly stopped shaking his head. He looked at his son and then he walked back towards him until they were almost chest-to-chest. “You think I care about that, boy?” he snarled.

  “There’s going to be a catastrophe here if you carry on,” Rudi snarled back. “Seriously. And it won’t just involve you. It’ll involve Ivari and Frances and Maret and everyone you ever cared about.”

  Toomas tipped his head to one side and looked at Rudi. “You think we have a chance.”

  Rudi glared at him. “From what Ivari told me, yes, you have a chance. They think you have a chance, otherwise they wouldn’t be opening a conversation with you.”

  Toomas poked Rudi in the chest with a bony forefinger. “They’re scared!” he shouted triumphantly. “And scared people make mistakes. We can win this, boy.”

  “If they are scared, they are very powerful scared people, and those are the worst kind,” Rudi said. “If you keep provoking them they’ll just squash you and carry on as if you never even existed.”

  “You think I’m afraid?”

  “I think you ought to be.”

  Toomas looked at his son for a long time without speaking. Finally, he shook his head. “I’m not stopping now. We’re having a meeting in the Conference Centre on Wednesday night. You should come.”

  “I’m going into Tallinn on Wednesday,” Rudi said. “I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

  Toomas shrugged. “Please yourself.” And he turned and walked back to the Humvee.

  Rudi heard the motor start up, heard the old man bully the big vehicle into what sounded like a fifteen-point turn before driving back down the track. He waited for the sound of the engine to die away. Then he waited another couple of minutes, just watching the sea. Then he took out his phone and dialled a number.

  When it was answered, he said, “I’m afraid Laurence has food poisoning and won’t be able to attend this evening.” Then he hung up and stood watching the sea for a long time.

  IT HAD BEEN a while since he’d been to Tallinn. He didn’t count flying into Ülemiste the other night and getting a cab straight to the Palmse tram. He didn’t know whether to be mildly pleased or mildly irritated that nothing seemed to have changed. The city looked more or less the same as he remembered. Maybe a few more big office buildings. The harbour hadn’t changed at all, and neither had the Old Town. Even the semi-drunken English stag parties were still coming here. Walking past the Hotell Viru, he spotted half a dozen young men in cold-weather clothing and colourful woolly hats stumbling singing out of the front doors of the Soviet-era edifice. He stopped across the street and watched them them go. Then he looked up at the façade of the old Intourist hotel. Legend had it that the KGB had bugged every room in the place, back when certain people thought these things mattered. He wondered if it was true; certainly someone would have checked, after the Russians left.

  He took a couple of buses. Had a drink in a bar down by the harbour. Stood and watched one of the big supercats boom in from the Gulf, forty-five minutes from Helsinki to Tallinn and completely impervious to the weather. Nordic Jet Line boasted that their catamarans could sail through the eye of a hurricane, although that had not been required of them yet.

  He took another couple of buses. He paused outside the Zoo, insanely large considering how relatively small the city was, but decided not to go in. He took another bus out to Kadriorg and spent an hour or so walking in the grounds of the Palace. He took some photographs. Then he took another bus back towards the centre of town.

  In the Old Town, he wandered for a while, looking in shop windows. He bought himself a couple of sweaters and a tin of small cigars. Feeling peckish, he wandered from restaurant to restaurant, checking menus, before deciding to eat at Troika.

  Troika hadn’t changed, either. From the vaulted cellar ceilings to the brightly-costumed staff to the menu, it was exactly the way it was the last time he’d been there, two days before he left Estonia for his long odyssey down the coast towards Restauracja Max.

  He ordered pelmeni, and asked the girl who took his order who the chef was, these days, and when she told him he smiled and said, “And tell him I want proper pelmeni. Not the insipid crap he serves to the tourists.”

  She looked at him and smiled uncertainly. “I’m sorry?”

  “Let me write it down,” Rudi said, gently taking her order pad from her and scribbling a note. “And make sure he gets that. I’ll know if he doesn’t and I won’t give you a tip.”

  She went away and Rudi poured himself a glass of water and lit a cigar and waited.

  Five minutes later, a small, red-faced man in chef’s whites came storming through the restaurant, shouting at the top of his voice in Russian. The waiting st
aff fled as he approached Rudi’s table. Rudi stood up and the chef came right up to him and flung his arms around him.

  “Sergei Fedorovich,” said Rudi, returning the hug.

  Sergei let him go and took a step back to look at him. “You lost weight,” he said critically. “You don’t eat well, wherever you are.”

  “I’m in Poland,” said Rudi.

  “Pah. There you are, then.” Sergei snapped his fingers at one of the waitresses, who were just coming out of hiding. “You. Stolichnaya and two glasses.” He looked at Rudi again and shook his head. “You don’t eat well,” he said again.

  They sat and Sergei raided Rudi’s cigars and lit one. “So,” he said. “You came back.”

  “I’m on holiday,” said Rudi.

  “You got your own restaurant yet?”

  Rudi shook his head. “I’m working for someone. In Kraków. It’s a good place; you should come down sometime.”

  Sergei sniffed. “To Poland? Those guys got long memories.”

  “And we don’t?”

  Sergei took a drag on his cigar and blew out a stream of smoke. He smoothed a hand over his thinning hair. “Things are not so bad here these days, you know?” Anti-Russian sentiment had run deep in the Estonian soul, even after the Soviets left. Estonia’s small but vocal ethnic Russian community had felt somewhat embattled ever since. “I’m not saying things are perfect now, but it’s better, you know?”

  Rudi nodded and sat back in his chair. Troika had been the first professional kitchen he’d ever worked in, Sergei the first professional chef he’d ever worked under. He’d thought the little man was an unequal mixture of magician and ogre. Sergei had been the first chef ever to hit him. With a roasting pan.

  “Now I’m going to make things awkward for you and ask why you didn’t stay in touch,” said the Russian.

  Rudi didn’t feel at all awkward; he’d rehearsed this the night before. He shrugged. “I was travelling. I was working all hours God sent. By the time I had a chance to write...well, it would have been embarrassing.”

  Sergei tipped his head to one side. “You’re different.”

  Rudi laughed. “I’m a better chef now.”